Lunch on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower, 23 floors above the Esquire offices, in New York City.

RAY KELLY [looking at recording device]: That's a pretty imposing-looking machine. It looks like a Taser.

SCOTT RAAB: When I go through security, sometimes they look at it.

RK: That deserves a strip search.

SR: A lot of people criticize the NYPD's frisking policy.

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RK: Frisking is a lifesaver. You can do a limited pat down if you're able to articulate a fear. Our police force is down 6,000 people from where it was a decade ago. Yet crime is down 80 percent in the last two decades in New York City — 80 percent. This city has become safer. And it's not just the stop-and-question policy — I call it a "policy of engagement." Last year we had about 8,000 weapons confiscated during that type of engagement. What we're doing is saving lives, and I think that message is, unfortunately, lost.

SR: Officer Peter Figoski [NYPD officer who was killed during a robbery in Brooklyn, December 12, 2011]. I feel awful asking about it, but it just happened.

RK: There was a call at about 2:17 in the morning where there's a burglary in progress. It's a two-story building. A person on the first floor hears commotion downstairs. People are yelling, "Where's the money? Where's the money?" Cursing, swearing. So he calls the police. Just as Figoski — a 22-year veteran of the department, loved his job — just as he walks in the door, one guy runs out the door. He is grabbed by a second cop, [Glenn] Estrada, in the yard. The front yard. The second perpetrator, he's in the boiler room. Figoski walks in the door and the perpetrator shoots him right here [points to face], and he goes down immediately. Figoski never regains consciousness. What happened is the bullet goes in his face and goes down and severs his temporal artery and other arteries. So there's no brain activity at all. We had 11 police officers killed in 1971. We had a police officer thrown off a stoop in March of last year, wrestling with somebody. Went down, he hits his head, dies. But we haven't had an [on-duty] officer shot and killed since 2007. The city has gotten safer. It was a much different place when I was riding in a radio car.

SR: Were you ever shot at?

RK: Not in the United States. In Vietnam.

SR: Have you ever fired your weapon?

RK: Yes. I didn't hit anybody. We used to be able to fire warning shots. Once, I fired into the lower part of a door.

SR: Do you still go to the range?

RK: I carry a gun, so I'll go shoot.

SR: You're armed right now?

RK: Sure. You get death threats in this job. That's why I have these guys [referring to his security detail] with me. I'm a nice guy, but people want to kill me.

SR: How did 9/11 change policing in New York?

RK: We've brought in talented people from outside. People from the Central Intelligence Agency, former U. S. attorneys. We have a cadre of analysts who come from the top schools in the country helping us gather and synthesize information to put it out to the patrol force in a digestible form. On September 11, 2001, we had 17 people working with the FBI. Now we have 120 working with them. You've got New York City police officers stationed overseas in 11 cities. They ask the "New York question." And they're able to respond when something happens.

When the coordinated attacks happened in Mumbai, India, in 2008, we had people there right after the shooting stopped. The Mumbai police welcomed us in. I don't know if we would do the same thing here. We found out very quickly that although they believed the guns were automatic, they were semi-automatic. They had hand grenades, they had a bomb — each one of these guys, ten guys, with rucksacks. The thing that concerned me most is let's say we had ten hostage situations throughout the city. How do you address that? How do you police it? How do you continue to police the rest of the city? So now we have about 400 heavy-weapons-trained people.

SR: What is a heavy weapon?

RK: A heavy weapon is a rifle — an MP5, like a machine gun. And we have M4s, which are small — what the military uses now. It's a version of the M16. That's the type of weaponry that you need to go up against somebody who is heavily armed. So as a result, we increased the number of people we have trained to handle heavy weapons. They were in the narcotics division for the most part. We trained them at heavy weapons, gave them suits to wear.

RK: I want to go back in the next couple months and see how things are going. We actually have six Haitian-American cops assigned there on a rotating basis. The State Department pays us to be there, but you want to have a presence. I was there for six months during the intervention in 1994. I've met all the presidents — Aristide, Préval, and now Martelly. It's a desperate place. But the Haitian people are terrific. They have a great work ethic. They have a sense of humor. But they just can't seem to catch a break. Everything goes in the wrong direction. I left there two days before the earthquake, and then I went back about six months later. There was wreckage all over the place. Bulldozer here, bulldozer there, but there was no huge renovation effort going on.

SR: There's no critical mass of people who can get things done.

RK: I've spoken to President Clinton — the U. S. envoy to Haiti — about this several times. He really cares about Haiti, but there is not the widespread rehabilitation you'd expect to see in a situation like that. And a major part of the problem is there's not a functioning government structure to really handle money coming in. There's lots of issues. They do things like burn down approximately 30 million trees a year. They cut them down and use them for charcoal. I was there during the hurricane. We dug out in Port-au-Prince — we, the people working with me, dug out 50 bodies. And it was just a little blip in the news. But when the mud slides started, there's nothing to stop the mud slides, so whoosh. Whole villages.

SR: Not an easy place to be.

RK: No, it isn't. People in the State Department we work with have said that Haiti is worse than Africa. Cholera killed a lot of people. And they also have this fatalistic attitude when something happens. When I was there, a bus turned over — the tires were bald. But it wasn't the tires. It was the evil spirits on the bus. How do you deal with that?

SR: In New York nobody gets away with blaming evil spirits.

RK: They'd like to.

SR: If the snowplows don't get out, people hold someone personally responsible.

RK: And they should. That's what people pay a lot of tax money here for.

SR: Could you ever get tired of this view?

RK: I'm fascinated by it. I actually live on the river and we look out the window a lot. We just look out on the harbor.

SR: You can see the Statue of Liberty??

RK: We see the Statue of Liberty. We see Staten Island. We see Ellis Island.

SR: You can now see 1 World Trade Center.

RK: All of a sudden it's there. And the same thing with 4 World Trade Center. Jesus Christ, it's like 50 stories.

SR: You've said the department's worried about the 9/11 Memorial being a place that would attract people who wanted to kill themselves.

RK: We have to think of these possibilities. People might commit suicide. We're concerned about the possibility of somebody jumping in. This is what we're paid to think about.

SR: Those are deep pools.

RK: But it's not as far as it looks. You might think you're gonna kill yourself, but it goes into about three feet of water. We actually have a plan for when that happens.

SR: Have you visited the memorial?

RK: I was down there a lot when it was being built. It's really very dramatic. You can feel the water spray.

SR: People from other places say, "I would never go back to work there." And I tell them, You don't understand. New Yorkers are gonna go back there not because they have to but because they want to.

RK: As it goes forward, security will be an issue. If something happens in New York, where does it happen? World Trade Center. What is the subway stop when you come into the PATH station? World Trade Center. It has to be a beautiful open space, but this is a target. We're the knuckle draggers that keep bringing this stuff up, but, hey, this is where you have people lined up. You have literally thousands of people there. It's symbolic, but it's substantive, too. It is a very target-rich environment.